Fracking, Jawohl?

A recent Wall Street Journal piece indicates that the Germans are beginning to face the consequences of their devotion to the environmentalist faith. Two years ago, under pressure from their Greens, the German government announced that it would end its use of nuclear power, and move to the so-called “renewable” energy sources of wind and solar power. It stopped any expansion of nuclear power and started phasing out the sector, with six of its plants due to close over the next seven years.

But this Green revolution has resulted in the same problems that have been experienced everywhere else it’s been tried. Both wind and solar are massively more costly than even nuclear power, which is itself more costly than conventional power, derived from fossil fuels. This is because both the wind and the solar facilities are at best only intermittent (much of the time, the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine), and because the power source is comparatively feeble (winds don’t often blow very hard, and the sun is 93 million miles away). So you need huge installations that have their own environmental costs. All of this requires massive taxpayer subsidization.

In Germany, the subsidies are directly passed on to the consumers, which has resulted in German households seeing what were already some of the highest electricity rates in Europe soar by a staggering 40% in just the past five years. German families now pay 15% more than the average for the EU zone.

Not only are average consumers feeling the pain, but businesses are as well. As you might surmise, businesses that use a lot of energy (such as many manufacturers) are cutting back their investment in Germany.

Ironically, the move to terminate nuclear power has hurt the environment. Since the only scalable and affordable alternative is fossil fuels, mainly coal, Germany say its CO2 emissions actually increased last year by 1.6%. If it has to rely on coal to replace all the nukes it plans to shut down over the next seven years, these emissions — as well as the emissions of other major pollutants — will skyrocket accordingly.

So — surprise, surprise! — fracking is beginning to look good to both the German government and many of its citizens. And — again, surprise! surprise! — German Greens are rising in opposition. Like environmentalists here, they typically only support sources of power that don’t actually work very well.

The German government, seeing the problems that “renewable energy” is causing, now proposes to allow fracking so long as it is not near any water sources, nor in any national parks or other conservation areas, and is subject to regulatory oversight.

While Germany has nowhere near the amount of frackable natural gas as nearby countries such as Poland and Ukraine, it still has an estimated 50-year supply.

But the German government should be under no illusions here. No matter how tightly it regulates fracking, the Greens will oppose it. They will oppose it not because they fear it won’t work, safely and efficiently, but precisely because they know it will.

The hard core of the Green movement consists in many cases of nature-cultists, people who view humans as a blight on the otherwise pristine, garden-of-Eden planet. They want economies to fail, so that humans will die off.

These worshipers of Thanatos can never be happy with anything that helps humanity flourish.

About this Author

Gary Jason is an academic philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. His recent books, Disturbing Thoughts: Unorthodox Writings on Timely Issues and Philosophic Thoughts: Essays on Logic and Philosophy are both available through Amazon.